Lottery tickets are popular items often offered for sale by convenience stores, grocery stores, and other outlets. “Scratch off” tickets (also known as pre-printed or instant win tickets, but hereinafter may be referred to simply as “tickets”) are amongst the most popular style of game play. Scratch off tickets are pre-printed, typically on relatively heavy paper stock, and have a game play region that is covered from view by a coating that is easily scratched or rubbed from the ticket to reveal the printed surface below. The printed game play region exposed after removing the coating indicates whether the purchaser of the ticket has won the game as dictated by the rules of the ticket. A winning ticket is typically redeemable for cash and/or prizes.
Tickets are typically chronologically numbered, bar-coded, and come in perforated fan-fold streams or rolls. Ticket streams are generally “inactive” upon delivery to a retail outlet. The retailer activates the stream prior to sale. This not only renders each ticket in the stream “live” so that the ticket may be redeemed for cash or prizes, but also makes the retailer liable for loss or theft of the tickets in the activated stream.
Although scratch off tickets provide a source of revenue to retail outlets, they are also a popular theft target due to the potentially great value inherent in a winning ticket. Since scratch off tickets are such desired objects of theft, the risk of lost revenue to a retailer is great. Since a fan-fold stream may contain hundreds of tickets and a particular location may offer dozens of different scratch off games, the number of activated tickets may reach the thousands, creating a potentially large liability. Therefore, the ever-present task of theft prevention is a burden shared by retailers of such items.
It is estimated that up to 40% of convenience store theft is attributable to loss of small, yet potentially valuable, items such as scratch-off tickets. Since tickets are typically stored behind the check-out counter, away from the reach of the typical shopper, it is accepted that employee theft accounts for much of these losses.
To steal scratch-off tickets from a ticket stream, employees have devised schemes to facilitate theft and avoid detection. For example, employees may steal the last few tickets in the stream. By the time the stream of tickets is exhausted, there is no way to attribute the loss to a particular employee. Similarly, tickets taken from the middle of a stream (the ticket stream may be reconnected with tape or a similar adhesive) are only discovered as missing well past the theft event making detection and attribution extremely difficult.
To avoid on-camera detection of theft, employees can, for example, simply charge an accomplice customer for a single ticket and hand off multiple tickets to his accomplice.
In order to deter employees from stealing these items, inventory tracking is employed by businesses to reduce shortages. However, when a store has thousands of individual tickets to track, the task of manually maintaining inventory from employee shift to employee shift becomes an almost insurmountable task. Even with a relatively efficient system in place, a manual count of such a large inventory typically takes 15 to 30 minutes to complete. With multiple employees and multiple shifts in a day, the cost incurred to pay these employees wages attributable to inventory tracking is substantial, and may even exceed the cost of the loss prevented by such manual reconciliation.
Often, cash registers utilize electronic methods of inventory tracking based on sales executed, but there are typically no physical measures in place that appreciably reduce theft. In particular, a theoretical inventory is typically tracked by the register, but the actual physical inventory is not accounted for in real-time. Manually keeping a physical inventory is costly, time consuming, and prone to inaccuracy, yet not well suited to prevent employee theft, as ticket dispensers are typically unsecured containers that are easily accessible by any employee.
A fully automated system, such as a vending machine, is not an appropriate solution to such a problem since the nature of lottery products is subject to regulations regarding the age of the purchaser. Human age verification is a vital aspect of sales of such goods. Additionally, such systems often do not give customers cash change, or at least can not provide large amounts of cash change. Also, customers often exchange winning tickets for the cash-equivalent of additional tickets. Lastly, vending machines are bulky, typically being too large for on-counter or behind-the-counter placement.
Therefore, there is a need for a secure scratch-off ticket dispenser that tracks and displays ticket inventory. There is a need for a dispenser that only dispenses tickets upon receiving an electronic signal to do so. There is a further need for a ticket dispenser that displays the inventory of the tickets secured within the dispenser. Additionally, there is a need for a dispenser that creates inventory and sales reports that reflect the actual number of tickets dispensed from a dispenser.